Making management aware and gaining their buy-in to your initiatives or ideas require sales mastery. Selling is simply your ability to make people buy-in to what you believe in. In my few years of practicing human resources, project management and business development, I have come to a conclusion that the most important skills a manager need is selling.

HR professionals are continually faced with a strong need to sell their initiatives to senior management. Most times their dominant thought and concern centres on “this idea is the ‘idea’ we need, but how do I make senior management feel the same way about the idea”.

Project managers continually have to sell the benefit of their plan to relevant stakeholder, without stakeholders buy-in, it’s very likely the project will fail. In fact, without the ability to sell, nothing works. No matter how we run away from it , the importance of developing excellent selling skills is not always significant until when your department is about to be relegated.

Selling an initiative involves taking the following steps

Plan how to sell before trying to sell: Organizations always ask questions such as “what is in it for us”, the HR executive must be prepared for a value based presentation using analytics, this actually takes intensive preparation, justifying how it affects the bottom-line e.g. ROI
Understand the initiative and how its support your organizations strategic goal
Don’t argue when objections are raised, acknowledge concerns and justify with more analytics that addresses each concern.

To gain support of senior management about HR value contribution, HR leaders must learn how to sell. An HR initiative is worthless until you gain the support of senior management! You are a sales person, so go out there and sell initiative!